How do you feel now? On the perceptual distortion of extremely recent changes in anger

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• 作者：Alan J. Lambert ; ^{alambert@artsci.wustl.edu" class="auth_mail} ; Stephanie A. Peak ; Fade R. Eadeh ; John Paul Schott
• 关键词：Revenge ; Retrospective bias ; Affective forecasting ; Anger ; Ingroup
• 刊名：Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
• 出版年：May, 2014
• 年：2014
• 卷：52
• 期：Complete
• 页码：82-95
• 全文大小：571 K

文摘

Previous research on retrospective biases in emotion has been largely concerned with mistakes that are made when people are asked to recall temporally distant affective experiences (e.g. those that occurred weeks or months ago). However, far less is known about people's abilities to accurately track extremely recent shifts in affective experience. Across three experiments, we show that people consistently distort perception of a very recent change in anger after being reminded of a historical act of revenge (i.e. the assassination of Osama bin Laden). Consistent with the implications of the 鈥渞evenge paradox鈥?(Carlsmith, Wilson, & Gilbert, 2008) these reminders made participants more angry. However, participants believed that this act of revenge had made them less angry鈥攖he exact opposite of what happened鈥攑rovided that their psychological allegiance to the ingroup had been primed. We discuss the implications of our findings in previous research on the interconnections between emotional experience and social categorization processes (Mackie, Maimer, & Smith, 2009), as well as the role of revenge in protecting the interests of the ingroup (Fehr & Gachter, 2002).